the divine download

Wired has a new article about a doctor practicing what is probably best be described as “complementary therapies.”

“The Divine came to me and said, Zhi Gang, transmit my soul software — a spiritual program — to humanity for healing,” Sha explains. “The Divine also told me to transmit soul acupuncture. He told me, I will download a soul acupuncture needle. Silent DownLOAAAD!! Now I offer free remote downloads to more than 1,000 physical human beings in one session.”

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placebo journal goes bloggy!

we have a casual reading section in our library in which we house some popular periodicals, including the placebo journal, a medical satire publication.  i was happy to learn that they now also publish a blog (http://placebojournal.blogspot.com/index.html).  doesn’t that make you happy too?

thanks, Able Pharmboy, for posting about this at ScienceBlogs. 

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if you use pubmed, check out this new article organizational program

i just downloaded the preview version of “papers” on my mac at home. wow, what a cool program. it opens like itunes, organizes like itunes, but instead of organizing music it organizes articles you retrieve from pubmed. you can read the pdfs of the articles right inside “papers,” without having to pop open adobe acrobat. you can even jot little notes to yourself within the program that are then attached to the article file. the program is still buggy, as the developers note on the website (http://mekentosj.com/papers/), but it’s going to be a fantastic program when it’s done. the description of the program says that if you put in predefined search terms it will automatically download new articles that fit those terms, as they are published; what a nice way to stay on top of what is being published, all within one program.

thanks to open access news for pointing me to this program! 

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tofu

how do you tell when tofu has gone bad?  does it smell or look different from when it is fresh?  post a comment if you have info on this.

Posted in food | 1 Comment

jose bedia, painter

Jose Bedia painting

while looking in chelsea galleries i stumbled upon the george adams gallery, which was displaying a survey of paintings by jose bedia. i had previously only seen one of his paintings at the los angeles county museum of art and had made a mental note to look at more of his work. what a nice thing to run into a whole gallery filled with his paintings. link to the gallery’s description of bedia’s work.

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Expertise in pictorial perception: eye-movement patterns and visual memory in artists and laymen.

A new article by Vogt and Magnussen (PubMed ID:17357707) was discussed at the site Cognitive Daily (note to self: add to Bloglines account). The article describes research to examine what artists and non-artists focus on while looking at an image.  They found that psychologists (or, non artists, as they are called in the article) tend to focus on identifiable components of an image while trained artists do not necessarily focus their eyes on the objects in an image.

This article is a nice attempt to get at how artists see, and by this, get at how artists think.  The images in the article (found at Cognitive Daily) clearly describe the eye paths by the artists and non-artists.

Some reactions to this article:

  • what kind of artists were used in this study?  would a photographer, who deals with making images on a flat, single plane, respond visually in the same way as a printmaker, who deals with making images in layers?
  • perhaps when artists first look at an image they take it all in at once, and then spend time roaming their eyes over the image to “feel” about the image.  maybe artists are concerned less with the content of an image and more about the concept.  this idea is supported by the eye paths noted in the article, where the path seems to be non-specific, non-focused on any particular component of the image.
  • i was not surprised to learn that both non-artists and artists focus more on identifiable components of an image when directed to “remember” what was in the image.  this is a task-based directive, engaging a different part of the brain.  it was nice to see how this works in the eye path pictures.

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